Hi all!
As Universities with free/discounted student tickets, I'm sure we have all faced the problem of a high rate of no-shows. How does your University handle this? Do you let students know their ticket is forfeit up to x amount of minutes before the performance? Do you encourage students to return tickets if they will not be using them? In addition, do you have a standby line at performances, and how do you handle it? I appreciate everyone's input on this as we are currently trying to fine tune our (fairly non-existent) policies and procedures around these questions!
Best,
Olivia A.
Hi Olivia,
One thing we have done at CU is eliminate all "Free tickets for students" (with the exception of performer comps for our shows), as well as any rush or "standby" for performances. The first practice, in our experience, teaches the student to devalue the ticket (and the associated even), while the second encourages poor buying behavior (Last-minute, when we'd rather they bought early).We offer a blanket 25% discount on all our shows to CU Faculty, Staff and Students. When a student group or class wants to attend, we offer a steep group discount (60% off), but still charge at least some money for the ticket. Obviously there are tradeoffs to these practices (particularly if you have a mandate to offer free tickets from a funding source), but we find that even making students pay $5 leads to a substantially higher attendance rate than complimentary tickets.
We have done a few different methods with free student tickets. Our main distribution method is at the door only night of show, beginning 1hr prior to show time. We hold back a limited number of tickets so that we are sure to have available seating at that time.
Another method we have used for free events is to have the policy that anyone with a ticket must be seated 15min prior to start time. At that time, any available seat will be re-distributed to someone who was not able to claim a ticket in advance. We make sure to put the language on the tickets, order page, and confirmation email.
The free ticket thing is definitely a hard issue to work with for those not on the receiving end!
Up until last year our process was utilizing an e-commerce platform hosted by the University that is only accessible by students. Students could reserve their ticket (1 per eligible performance) for $0. Then about a week prior to each performance, we'd download the list of reservations and print out a checklist by name. We'd print up a small number of tickets, at a time, not assigned to anyone in particular. Any time during that week, students could come to the ticket office, show their ID for validation, pick up their ticket, and we'd cross them off the list. On the day of the show, we'd print up a handful more for students to pick up at the window. At that point they wouldn't need a previous reservation unless the show was really tight and we were very limited on student tickets. Although my predecessor would run a standby line we never did that on my watch, we'd just hand out tickets since except in very unusual circumstances we weren't in danger of 'overselling' our allotment of tickets. While this worked pretty well it was a labor-intensive process and requiring students to pick up tickets in person did not encourage student participation. So, we've moved to an online order model where we can now validate multiple student IDs through TNEW and the students can reserve their own tickets, as well as add additional tickets for other students and non-student guests (which they pay for) in the same order so they can sit together. Since this is brand new we don't know what the no-show rate might be, but since they are active in choosing their seats and can also sit with their friends, we expect more active participation from them. This process took YEARS and a ton of customization from several departments to make work but we're excited about its potential to make things easier for students!
This is one of the key reasons why we've moved away from free tickets. It took some convincing with the stakeholders who advocated for free distributions, but we tracked NSCAN attendance rates of seats that we knew were giveaway comps through price type. After we were able to present evidence to groups that less than 40% of free tickets were actually used in the hall, our stakeholders were much more willing to experiment with an "almost free but still a small cost" tickets, such as a $5 minimum. Those performed much better for us. While we had fewer overall students buying tickets than free tickets issued, we had a 90%+ use rate on the tickets.The only free tickets for students we still do is a specific program for string music majors who want to attend our professional string quartet. Those tickets are heavily managed (there are only 10 per performance, and we have many more string students, so they have to sign up), and the faculty who manages the distribution of the tickets receives a report of who did or did not use their requested ticket after the show. If a student passes after requesting a ticket, they're not allowed to use the program again without a one-on-one conversation with their primary instructor. The strict administration works extremely well, and we rarely have a seat go unfilled.